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Category: Teaching Ideas

At its core, the Education Week article “The Power of Reading Aloud in Middle School Classrooms” discusses the power and skills gained by reading aloud in the classroom. However, the author, Timothy Dolan goes deeper by explaining how a central theme of readings creates linear understanding and how reading those texts aloud together allow the teacher constant opportunities for differentiation.

This TED Talk, The Beauty of Data Visualizationfrom David McCandless focuses on the way we receive and perceive information. Framing information in a more visual way helps for greater understanding, knowledge attainment, and implementation into our daily lives. For students and teachers, this approach will broaden your mind and help evolve a growth mindset.

The race against the standards clock is always on for teachers of Mathematics and Language Arts, which can make consideration of pairing the two areas a challenge. However, author Ryan McCarty argues that teachers should consider The Power of Writing in Math and work together to help their students get collectively stronger.

McCarty takes some example standards of ELA and Math and breaks down how the use of writing in Math not only makes that subject strong, but the descriptive nature of the writing allows for the ELA side to grow as well.

The author concludes by sharing a powerful insight on how the power of writing in math provides direct insights into the minds of your students. Powerful stuff if these two curricular areas can find the time (fingers-crossed) to collaborate!

Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator and star of the hit broadway musical, Hamilton, discusses how he created a distinctive pattern of rapping for his character. He demonstrates his language arts skills with his mention ofinternal rhymes and assonance.

Fake news has become ubiquitous on social media, and it’s increasingly difficult to determine if the stories are legitimate or not. Following are some resources for helping kids and adults sort out the fact and the fiction. Below that you’ll find a real NPR news story about how one high school class is confronting this problem.

In early Beatles’ music, the studio only provided a way to record what the band was already doing live. Technology didn’t present any new opportunities. That completely changed with the album Revolver. In particular, the song “Tomorrow Never Knows” reveals how technology was able to help the band capture the sounds they heard in their heads. Producer George Martin along with sound engineers were able to use technology to help the Beatles redefine their music. Watch this video from the PBS series Soundbreaking to learn more.

A few weeks ago, I was watching an episode of the excellent PBS program Soundbreaking. I realized that the Beatles’ music is another great way to think about the SAMR model. As Ringo Starr explains, when they recorded their early albums, they basically just went in the studio and recorded what they’d been playing live for audiences. This is a great example of substitution in SAMR because the studio allowed the Beatles to record their music, but it didn’t actually change the music.